→ Your growth practice

Drive traffic to your SaaS website by getting featured on TikTok.

→ Quick explanation

SaaS professionals usually ignore the TikTok influencer marketing, thinking it works better for Direct-to-Customer (DTC) brands. However, a couple of examples prove that TikTok may significantly impact a SaaS company’s website traffic, signups, and conversion rate.

There are some limitations for B2B companies, as B2C or B2C2B SaaS companies may benefit more from getting featured on TikTok. However, there are B2B SaaS brands and B2B SaaS CEOs killing it on TikTok. For example, Guillaume Moubeche, co-founder and CEO at Lemlist, has a personal TikTok account.

→ Definitions

📓 TikTok influencer marketing: Promoting your business/brand by collaborating with TikTok influencers/creators whose followers match your target group.

📓 Interest graph: Most social media platforms use an algorithm based on a social graph. This approach predicts what content their users may want to view based on whom they follow, their interests, where they live, and more. However, the TikTok algorithm works based on an interest graph, which analyses the way users interact with videos. Subsequently, the algorithm will feed users with similar content they’ve previously liked and engaged with.

→ Quick Facts

According to the Digital 2022 Report by HootSuite and We Are Social:

✅ TikTok is the 6th most-used social platform in the world.

✅ TikTok’s ad reach increased to 885 million users by 2022.

✅ TikTok users also clock in 19.6 hours per month using the TikTok Android app.

✅ TikTok gains 8 new users every second.

Also, here’s a TikTok advertising audience overview:

→ Getting featured on TikTok

• Randomly: Some (lucky) SaaS companies may get featured on TikTok by accident as some influencers will talk about their favorite platforms and share tool-related insights or tricks with their audiences.
• Collaboration-based: Like with Instagram or other social media agreements, some SaaS companies will reach out to TikTok influencers for collaboration. In other words, some SaaS brands pay TikTok influencers/creators to get featured in their videos.
  

→ Your growth opportunities

By embracing the TikTok influencer marketing playbook, you’ll access growth benefits such as:

• Get your brand in front of a huge audience
• Attract more leads or users by driving new signups
• Boost your conversion rate
  

→ Case examples

>> Leave Me Alone, an email unsubscription platform

• In May 2022, the co-founder of Leave Me Alone, James Ivings, published a Twitter post mentioning a traffic spike to the company’s website. The origin of the spike was unknown.
  

• One day later, James discovered the spike source. It was TikTok. James figured it out by talking to a new customer in support chat. The customer told James about a TikTok video featuring Leave Me Alone.
  

• James had no idea someone created a Leave Me Alone video on TikTok.
• Leave Me Alone got featured randomly only because the TikTok influencer wanted to create a productivity piece of content. Here’s the video.
  

• Jule Sacree, the TikTok video creator, has over 216k followers. Her Leave Me Alone video gathered over 52k hearts, 178 comments, and 553 reports. Here are some comment examples:
  

• Two days from the mention, Leave Me Alone made $2600 from one-off $7 payments and added up to $400 to MRR (15%).
• It’s worth mentioning that Leave Me Alone also got featured on Instagram, accumulating more than 15,000 likes. However, the Instagram post didn’t add any extra traffic.

• As James highlights, getting featured on TikTok drove more signups than Product Hunt and Hacker News combined.
  

>> Tactiq, real-time transcription for Google Meet and Zoom

• According to Sam Holston, a growth marketer at Tactiq, the company acquired 150,00+ new users by spending $1820 working with TikTok creators.
• As Sam indicates, the Tactiq team initially reached out to 320 creators, of which 16 agreed to work with them. As a result, the creators published 22 videos on TikTok.
• Tactiq paid on average $83 per video.
• It’s worth noting that Tactiq targeted multiple niches, such as students, product designers, marketers, and HR professionals.
• The TikTok videos generated more than 7,000,000 impressions and over 900,000 likes.
• As Sam concludes, “Tiktok can be a wildly successful acquisition channel for SaaS businesses if your audience skews younger or you can find niche creators that align with your product.”
• As for the ratio between the number of followers an influencer has and engagement, Tactiq paid more attention to the overall number of views. As Sam notes, “If the average is over 20-30k and we can see recent videos with vitality (200k+) then it’s likely to perform well.”
• Here’s a Tactiq video example on TikTok. Here’s a second one.

→ What to consider?

Questions:

• What niche do I want to target?
• What hashtags should I use to search for TikTok influencers?
• How should I approach TikTok influencers? Should I create a cold outreach campaign? Or should I personalize my communication?
• What type of TikTok videos should I ask influencers to create?
• How will I measure the success of this growth practice?
  

Requirements:

• This practice may work better for B2C SaaS companies.
• Overall, there are no specific requirements to start contacting and collaborating with TikTok influencers.
  

→ Your action framework

📒 Identify your main target group.

💡 To consider: As Sprout Social highlights,” 47.4% of US TikTok users are below the age of 30, and over half of those users are teenagers. For brands targeting younger audiences, TikTok is a gold mine.”

📒 Search for TikTok influencers. According to Sam Holston, Tactiq found influencers by searching for hashtags in related niches, such as #studyhacks, #UX, #digitalmarketing, and more. Then, the company compiled a list of TikTok creators with 10-200k followers.

💡 To consider: According to a research conducted by Patrick Walsh, the founder of PublishingPush, when collaborating with TikTok influencers, companies will pay the following rates:

• Nano-influencers with 10k - 10k followers: from $10 to $100 per video
• Micro-influencers with 10k-50k followers: from $100 to $500 per video
• Mid-tier influencers with 50k-500k followers: from $500 to $5,000 per video
  

📒 Reach out to TikTok influencers. It’s essential to add some personalization to your emails. Here are some outreach recommendations from Sam Holston:

• Treat creators like people.
• Explain your product use case for their audience.
• Reference their previous work.
• Make an offer explaining how you will compensate them for their work.
• Pro tip: Creator response rate was 3x higher via their listed email vs. direct messaging on other social channels.
  

📒 Ask TikTok influencers to create persona-centric videos framing a specific problem. Here are two successful TikTok videos promoting Tactiq:

• Example 1
• Example 2

📒 Upload this content to your company’s social media or use it as an ad. Make sure you’ve got the permission of the TikTok creator to do so.